I stood dead still with it in my hands, because when I got the tape and the plastic peeled back down in the bottom of that grain tank, it was not the thing a mind jumps to about a man who ran off owing the whole county. It was money, and it was a letter, and that letter had been written by a man watching himself disappear.
The cash was banded up, a fair bit of it, and the letter was in a hand that started out steady on the first line and got worse as it went along, wandering, words crossed out and tried again, like the writing of a man fighting to hold onto his own thoughts long enough to get them down on paper. And what it said turned my stomach cold, and then it broke my heart.
Merle was losing his mind. That was the whole of it. He wrote that it had been coming on for a couple of years now, the forgetting, the confusion, the hours he could not account for, the bills he paid twice and the ones he clean forgot, the deals he made and could not remember making, which is how a good farmer goes under owing everybody in a single bad season. He knew what it was. His own mother had gone the very same way. And he was terrified, the letter said, terrified of the day he would not know his own name, of hurting somebody with a combine because he forgot what he was doing out there, of turning into a thing his family would have to tend to. So he ran. While he still knew enough to run. Before it took the part of him that could still choose.
I am not a thief. I am a sick man who got scared. This money is what I could scrape together. Pay back who I owe, and tell them I am sorry, and tell them I never meant to become this. I have to go now, before I forget how to go.
I had cussed that man for a year. Everybody in Aberdeen had. We all had him figured for a coward who lit out in the dark laughing at us with our money. And he was a frightened, sick man saying goodbye to his own self, trying to get out of the way before the disease made him a burden, leaving behind what little money he had and an apology with nobody around to read it.
It took some doing, but I found him. Merle is in a memory care place two states off, where his sister finally tracked him down months after he wandered away. He does not know her most days. He does not know me at all, and never really did get the chance to. But I drove out there anyway, and I sat with him a while, and I paid back every name in this county out of the money he left, exactly the way he asked, and I told the co-op the truth about him, so the story would get set right before it was the only thing left of the man.
He is not a thief. He was a good farmer and a scared, sick man, and he did the last clear thing his mind would let him do, which was try to make it right and spare us all the sight of him going. We know that now. I just wish we had known it sooner, while there was still enough of him left to feel us being kind.